Chris Benham, PhD Candidate, Music

Location: Vanserg 111 (29 Francis Ave.)

CMP Capstone Committee:

Julie Mallozzi
Lecturer on Art, Film, and Visual Studies

Carol Oja
William Powell Mason Professor of Music

noema

noema is a sound and light installation that explores how texture and orientation condition acts of perception. The installation centers on a seven-foot translucent cube that emits a continuous composition of sound and light from within. As listeners move around the exterior, the sound changes with their position. Though the signal remains constant, its perception does not. The work examines listening as a relational and situated practice rather than a neutral act of reception. By removing representational and narrative content, noema foregrounds the phenomenological conditions that shape auditory experience—proximity, enclosure, exposure, and the body’s orientation in space. Sound here becomes a means of thinking through perception itself.